Court orders Prague High Prosecutor Rampula to leave post

The Prague High Prosecutor Vlastimil Rampula will have to leave his post
once again after the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that he made
serious errors in the execution of his duties. The court thus settled the
latest stage in a dispute between Rampula and Justice Minister Jiří
Pospíšil, who sacked him for influencing a number of high-profile
political cases.

Vlastimil Rampula, photo: CTK
The Supreme Administrative Court found on Tuesday that the Prague High
Prosecutor accumulated multiple mistakes in multiple cases, including some
of the biggest cases of alleged corruption of the last decade - namely the
purchase of Gripen fighter jets from Sweden and the infamous case of the
bankrupt IPB bank.

With regards to IPB bank, Vlastimil Rampula was cited for ordering another
prosecutor not to immediately appeal the acquittal of seven of the bank’s
managers. By impeding a case without sufficient groundwork available to
him, Rampula violated principles of transparency and expertise, the court
said. In this case, however, the court also laid in to the other prosecutor
for heeding the order, saying that the institute of state prosecution
“must not be a collection of colourless, anonymous officials waiting for
orders, with no responsibility of their own. The transfer of IPB from the
state to its rival ČSOB is believed to have cost taxpayers upwards of 34
billion crowns.

In the case of the Swedish fighter jets though, Mr Rampula was cited for
not following orders himself. Having received a clear order from the then
Supreme State Prosecutor to keep the case open and expand the
substantiation in numerous states, Rampula and others failed to do so in
Sweden, where the aircraft were manufactured. According to the judge,
Rampula claimed that they would not have found anything out in Sweden
anyway. Josef Baxa was the presiding judge in the trial and told Czech
Radio where he found the prosecutor’s mistakes:

“It was an odd combination of action and inaction. First of all, there
was a set of things that he, as a leading state prosecutor, did not react
to and thus accumulated errors in the work of his subordinates… in spite
of having been informed of the fact through numerous checks made by the
supreme state prosecutor. Or in some cases he trivialised the problems and
led long discussions over them. In addition to that, he remained inactive
on obvious orders from the former supreme state prosecutor in the case of
the Gripens, and did not ask for assistance from Sweden. And lastly he
rejected an order from the supreme state prosecutor to provide certain
analytical data on the activities of his elite department.”

Josef Baxa, photo: CTK
Vlastimil Rampula himself has declined to comment on the decision until he
receives the judgement in writing. The verdict of the Supreme
Administrative Court however is the opposite of that reached earlier this
year by the Municipal Court of Prague, which will have to review the matter
again. The administrative judges rebuked the lower court for dealing with
the Justice Minister’s reasons for sacking Rampula individually, rather
than in a wider context. The mistakes he made, said the court, affected the
running of an elite institute dealing with serious cases of economic and
financial crime.